Übergame

[Duion]

Übergame is a project I started end of last year, I noticed there is no real alternative in the open source sector for a 3D FPS, so I decided making on myself.

Most time so far went into learning all the software, blender, gimp, game engine, game developement and so on, because I had no skills in that before, but now I got a little routine.

My philosophy is to make an allround first person shooter game with an asset library of artwork and basic gameplay mechanics, so others can quickly assemble their custom maps beside the default mappack I created.

I just want to test what others think about this idea and what you would like to see in a game like this, for example gameplay modes, scenarios and so on, if more like military simulation or more like quake3 arena.

So far my idea about the license is to release it as BY-NC-SA 3.0 and to finance it with a donation system.

I noticed that this gets quite a big and complex project, but at the moment I cannot say what contributors I want, my head is a bit overloaded at the moment, first I try to make a alpha-version-prototype some day and after that people can do what they want anyway, but staying within the main project would be best I believe.

My motivation here is mainly because I want some feedback and inspiration and what kind of people with what skills are available.

Provisory projectpage with a few process screenshots so far is:

http://xn--bergame-m2a.blogspot.de/

And I made two preview videos of my artwork so far:


youtu.be/EsVXuoB4M28


youtu.be/gh7KoCbtmXo

[qubodup]

Everything with Umlauts gets strangeness-bonuspoints from me.

I moved this to "Ideas", as long as it's not an open source project but just discussion about a potential one.

CCBYSANC is non-free and if you like to read a lot, there's quite some text on this topic at http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC about the problems of the license.

CC licenses are not recommended for code http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequen ... oftware.3F

http://www.deadcyborg.com/ is another blender-made, donation-funded game. I'm afraid they are not making enough money to live on it though. It is non-free, which kind of shows that protecting your work from open sharing is not enough.

By the way, have you ever worked on a game project that was finished before?

[Duion]

Yes it is not open source right now and I am still considering what to do, (I already opensourced some of my artwork, but then thought I am doing enough for a game), because this is a very difficult part, so far I only sticked to stuff made by me and public domain base material (which made it quite hard), so I have all possibilities open.

So if someone has a better idea how to make this open source and at the same time offer some protection for the content, so that others do not rip it off. My idea was just, that to make it noncommercial, that if someone finds a way to make money out of it, he can ask for a deal, but at the same time everyone can use it for free, so you have something similar to the freemium model.
What I want to do is to make it free enough to motivate others to use it, but not so free, that everyone will rip it off.

My plan is not to live from it, thats a far away goal anyway, but if theres enough money to pay for a server and to offer a little bonus for specialists that help in things I am not good at would be enough for me. If money or not, I will work on it anyway, non-profit would be ok.

No, I nerver worked on a game project before, but long time ago I made some maps for counter-strike, action-halflife and farcry, so thats my speciality.

[Evropi]

Well, the fact is that it's almost impossible to monetise anything copyleft. Okay, there are the 'sacred three' ways of doing so: 1. selling support 2. offering proprietary contracts 3. offering proprietary extensions. So a copyleft license like the GPLv3 will do the task just fine, because no-one in their right mind would even attempt to sell anything with that license. But honestly, quoting Calinou, no-one has ever really sold anything marked CC-NC-* anyway. Just open up the damn thing and allow it to be used elsewhere because chances are that you are not making world-class content that can be used in any game project. Ubisoft probably won't be fishing around on GitHub for assets, however good they are, simple as that.

If you don't plan to make money from it, my advice is just to open source it anyway. This should be the default. It's hard to see why freeware exists nowadays if it's not a stripped-down version of a commercial product. Also, open source is all about copying. If you don't want anyone to 'rip it off', then keep it to yourself and forbid any type of redistribution. The fact is, if you want your assets or code to be used by other people, or examined for educational purposed (I for one have always learnt by example, and looking at other people's source code is very helpful to me), you want to make the license as liberal as possible.

I still don't understand what the game is about. Right now it sounds like you just implemented an FPS engine in Torque3D, and I thought it came with an FPS demo anyway. My suggestion is to focus on one thing and one thing only, like Red Eclipse, a clear-cut arena shooter. You can't allow for any subgenre of FPS, simple as that. What I'd really like to see is a Cannon Fodder-alike game (okay, not FPS, but still Rambo as duck) such as Running with Rifles (which you should all be buying, because it's awesome).

[Duion]

I just read, that Red Eclipse for example used CC-BY-SA for the assets and zlib license for the code, so this looks like a good model so far. At the moment there isn't any custom code in my project so far, everything is handled in script files. Going CC-BY-SA would be ok for me and the other stuff could be left with the original Torque license or something like zlib or GPL.
Yes, Torque3D came with an FPS demo, but it's all very basic, no real gameplay. I thought so, too its already an FPS template, but then realized there is still a lot to do.
Others told me already to release an art pack, but there are a lot of art packs out there, but that looks sensless for me to sell people packs, because most people will have no knowledge to make real use of that. With ripping of I did not mean that others steal or copy it, but split the stuff and pieces of things will fly around here and there and nothing real is done with it, as it's happening with most stuff.

When I get it to work I will release it, but at the moment, I am waiting for an engine update to fix some bugs for example LOD-ing system and wind animations and someone to help me with some coding things. Also I am new to all these things and there is a hell of stuff to learn, I hope I will get used to Git soon.

[charlie]

Looks amazing Duion, and the whole license issue is one a lot of people struggle with in terms of knowing both what they want to achieve and finding the best approach to achieve that.

Evropi makes a solid argument. However, Evropi, please don't swear on the forums. It's not necessary. I fixed it.

[Julius]

I noticed there is no real alternative in the open source sector for a 3D FPS, so I decided making on myself.

Somehow this strikes me as very funny I guess the general consensus is that there are not too many good open-source games except for 3D FPS of which there are plenty

My personal advise regarding this project: Any development to create an improved game base with Torque3D is good, as long as it is as freely licensed as possible to allow other projects to build upon it (especially as experience tells that most projects never really get beyond a certain stage, so the very least is to make the progress available to other projects too).

[Skorpio]

I concur with Julius. There are ... I don't want to say "enough" ... but plenty of FOSS FPS games. However, there is a lack of single player shooters and I'd really love to see a FOSS Half-Life, Bioshock or Jedi Knight (of course not direct clones).

[Evropi]

Actually, yes, there are a lot of great open source first person shooters. The reason I referenced Red Eclipse by the way is because its forum is hosted here. You should try it! It's one of my favourite games of all time, actually. You should try it Duion! Cube Engine games simply have the best map editor (in fact, that's the focus of the Cube Engine, a friendly and powerful map editor).

As for 'script files', well, I think that's the right way to do it if you want to make an FPS in Torque 3D. I certainly would not fork the Torque Engine. I'd make complicated scripts that sit on top of Torque3D. As far as I know you can create servers that can operate with Torque Engine games, too. So it's ideal for a multiplayer FPS game, as well as a single-player one of course. And as qubodup (?) said, make games, not engines! There's way too many game engines out there... if you want to see lots of people using your software, you are far more likely to get downloads by making a game instead of a game engine. Just my 2 cents. And besides, you seem to have imagination (you're a map designer, whereas soulless I cannot design maps to save my life)... just what's needed to make fun games.

What we do lack in the 3D FPS space though is a more realistic shooter. What I'd really like is something in the vein of Hidden & Dangerous 2 (i.e. very realistic, physics, vehicles, loads of very realistic weapons, inventory, etc, and that's just the multiplayer part), but I'll settle for a Battlefield-like game. I don't like Counter-Strike that much because it doesn't allow for huge maps, though the gameplay is of course great. That is something we need in the open source sector.

PS: sorry charlie.

[Duion]

There may be a lot of open source FPS games, but no real alternative, you know, open source games in the past based up on old versions of engines that were opensourced, because the developers had something better or in the case of valve they opensourced it and then saw they could make money with it and took it back and commercialized counter-strike for example. And since there is not much full time developement in in the open source sector, they will not keep up to date, so this all makes most projects a dead end. But maybe I am not up to date.
I will not work on a a single player game, because I don't like the concept and it is a lot of work and I do not have the skills for that. The most simple thing would be to make a quake-clone simple run around, jump and shoot, no advanced functions, but this may be the reason why almost every game out there is a quake clone and I don't want a quake clone, I played so many of them, I would like to see more a crysis or arma clone, instead.

I for example like level design and I want something similar to modern game engines to not limit my creativity or the graphical appearance.
My goal so far was to see, if I can recreate graphics of the games today. Maybe Torque is not really up to date in technology, for example no DirectX11 support yet, but my demo videos were made on a 5 year old computer, so there may be some space upwards to stress it out more, but you need to keep it playable on everyones computer also.

@Evripo
Yes that was part of my plan, to make it more realistic and big maps. The main difference between quake-style-engines and cry-engines-style engine is, that in the past you build levels with solid shapes and later with crysis you make objects and use meshes, so you can cull out individually any objects to remove overhead so you can make levels that are lots of square kilometers in size, while your computer will tilt after a few hundred meter in the quake engines.
But I realized that makers of Arma and others did quite a good job to keep it realistic, because it's lots of work and knowledge about nature and physics, while in quake-like-fantasy shooters you did not think and could do what you like, jump 100 meters far and take no damage? No problem. Make huge sensless abstract structures floating in space? No problem also.
The highlands map is 2x2kilometers in size and the other one 500x500 meters. Took me some time to reach an authentic level in mapping. 2x2 kilometers is already a little to big, 2x2 kilometers was also the default size in far cry levels, now I know why the limited this by default to this.
What I fear of so far is characters and animations, I counted and there would be something around 50 animations needed to make it realistic and have an animation for every state, of course every additional weapon would have to be adjusted seperately. Also I did not find a solution for realistic open source sound effects.

[Evropi]

I think Torque is alright. It is optimised very well and works excellently on older hardware, something that can't be said for most big bucks proprietary engines (e.g. the UDK). It is also very cross-platform. And not like DirectX is that great anyway (like not being backwards and sometimes not forwards-compatible). I'm pretty sure Valve never made their engine open source by the way, but I may be wrong on that. Torque can scale very well with minimal skill.

Also, consider how difficult it is for indie and open source developers to make an engine like CryEngine. Then add the hundreds of almost cinematic-quality assets that go into a game like Crysis. Impossible, that is.

By the way, the Quake engine (and similar, Call of Duty for one is based off of it) and CryEngine for example have different goals. Maps in arena shooters tend to be smaller not only due to the gameplay style, but also because they are much more detailed. In games with large maps the maps are usually not very detailed - just a long terrain with various techniques used to randomise the textures. Maybe a few trees and a building here and there.

Plus, you're kind of missing the point of games such as Quake. Quake and RE are intentionally unrealistic. ARMA is no better a game because it's realistic. In fact, I find it horribly boring, the driving especially. 'It's your mission to save this island, now drive 700 km in that direction'. How about I get in my car and do that instead? But yes, different goals, can't be compared.

Anyway, how powerful a computer that you have are we talking about here? You said about 5 years old. The video seems... very choppy. Recording software, of course, adds a very significant overhead.

Still, the work you've done is admirable (from what I understand you textured and morphed the whole map by hand), but I'd pause there for a moment if I were you. You have to think about the gameplay a bit. Consider the fact that a lot of research into real weaponry goes into ARMA, for instance. And vehicles. And sounds are, in fact (in ARMA's case), usually taken from the real-life version of the very gun you are holding in the game. Can you replicate that? Probably not, and hiring out a recording studio is very expensive.

You must take a step back and realistically think about what you want to do with your game. First, what you'd like the 1.0 version of the game to be ideally like, and second, if you can achieve all the goals you set out for yourself. Rewriting some of the core scripts in C++ (I think Torque supports accessing the API via C++) to make it scale better? Absolutely. Professional quality sounds from real guns and vehicles? Probably not. After you've done all that thinking

I just wanna say by the way, I don't want to dissuade you, I always like people who really believe in something. But I'm just saying, be realistic about what you can do so you may one day actually finish the game. Derek Yu's article on finishing a game is a classic, and I think any game developer should read it.

[Duion]

Torque is not optimised that well, the initial release was very laggy and had performance issues, but they seem to have fixed that. I have seen that someone is already working on converting Torque to OpenGL, I never liked DirectX anyway and if Torque finally runs well on linux with openGL that would be a great thing.
I made a bunch of maps in CryEngine and its pretty similar to Torque3D, it is just a tool, how good you perform with it depends on your skills. With CryEngine you will mostly see people placing the high-quality demo assets (which Torque does not have) which come with the engine on some terrain and think they have done anything special, but if you really want to achieve something your own also with the best engine it's quite a long way.

I have a core2duo e4600 I think, so 2x2,4ghz and 2gig ram, with a geforcegt610. The riverside video is indeed very laggy, because it was with the initial Torque version which was very slow, but in the highlands with the second version of Torque I could play and record smoothly in HD resolution and postfx turned on. Although videos are converted to 24fps I think to save space.

Making the terrain and texturing it is not the problem, most time goes into making the textures and making the models in blender. For the highlands level I generated a heightmap and basic texture layer masks and then improved it by hand inside the game and the riverside level is all hand morphed and painted, was the faster way with a small level.
If you want to get an idea how long things take, I found a good thread about that here: http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3994
So there it says 1-2 hours for a texture and 4-8 hours for a scenery object, but only if you are a professional and got some routine. For the first time people tend to work more about a week on one object in blender.

And modern levels today are not less in detail, I would say they are approximated 10times the size and 100times the detail compared to old quake-style, measured by polygons.
For leveling for halflife there was a limit of 600-1000 polygons each scene, today you easiely can have a million or two.

About finishing, the first version would be a basic set of maps maybe around 6, each one in all different day times and weather, day, night, morning, evening, rain, fog to add some more variation and you can start or join internet games for basic deathmatch style gameplay, thats a not so far away goal I think.

[charlie]

Hey Duion. It would seem that you and TheDushan have somewhat overlapping goals (and you've already seen his efforts, it seems).

Potential for collaboration?

[Duion]

I think he is busy enough with porting it to linux, the big missing piece at the moment is character/weapon setting up with scripts, animations and sound effects, but it will work without first, but this seems to be the rarest thing in the open source community.

[charlie]

I forked the monetizing discussion.

[mdwh]

I think Torque is alright. It is optimised very well and works excellently on older hardware, something that can't be said for most big bucks proprietary engines (e.g. the UDK). It is also very cross-platform. And not like DirectX is that great anyway (like not being backwards and sometimes not forwards-compatible). I'm pretty sure Valve never made their engine open source by the way, but I may be wrong on that. Torque can scale very well with minimal skill.

Well the whole DirectX vs OpenGL is a big can of worms, of which there are many different opinions People have their own reasons for liking DirectX, just as with OpenGL, that isn't simply about "FUD" as that blog claims (and Carmack, who is quoted about DirectX, famously changed his opinion in more recent years). I think the website analogy for cross-platform is poor, as websites are intended to be cross-platform, native apps aren't. Cross-platform is obviously more important for some people, but for others who are writing games for Windows and/or X-Box, it isn't. Plus there's nothing stopping an engine using both - some of my games support OpenGL and DirectX (giving Windows users a choice, and Linux uses OpenGL). They're both good APIs though, each has their pluses and minuses.

The change in compatibility between DirectX versions is a pain, but it's also allowed them to clean out the old crap and optimise for the fast path, where as OpenGL has multiple methods, with beginners making the mistake of glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES) etc... (though I think OpenGL ES is better, but then, you lose the compatibility with OpenGL).

[Duion]

Any ideas about the licensing? I will make the artwork CC-BY-SA, but I'm not sure about the code, ok there is no real code added at the moment, just some little scripts here and there, but this may change later, so a guideline would be good, if others want to contribute or reuse something.

[Julius]

Keep the code license the same as upstream, e.g. in case of Torque3D the MIT license. That way changes can be contributed back easily and others using the engine can for sure utilize your code.

[Duion]

Yes, seems to be the best option.